This makes us sound a little like a concerned proctologist inexplicably contracted to Cricket Australia, but we’ve spent half our week monitoring the movements of the 2018 Test team.

Mitch Marsh was the latest to face questions about Usman Khawaja’s non-revelation that everyone on that team knew some level of ball tampering was going on.

“Three guys were handed massive punishments and the other eight of us weren’t,” he said. “Speaking as one of the bowlers – one of the players who used and exploited that tampered ball – and also one of the eight who walked away entirely scot-free, I’m obviously keen to linger on this a while.”

Nooo, he didn’t say that really. He actually said he wasn’t going to say anything at all. When asked why, he explained: “My honest answer is because I’ve personally moved on. I respect that others probably haven’t, but I have, and I hope that’s respected.”

Is this a well known and widely-acknowledged moral obligation we were previously unaware of? That if someone personally moves on from involvement in potential wrongdoing, you’re supposed to respect that?

We’re struggling to think of precedents. At the end of Point Break, Bodhi is the sole surfing bank robber to get away and Johnny Utah pursues him to the ends of the earth (Australia). When he finally confronts him, he does let him go, but it isn’t because Bodhi has played the “I’ve moved on” card. It seems like it’s more on the basis that Bodhi’s about to kill himself trying to surf a colossal wave during a 50-year storm.

There does admittedly seem to be a level of agreement in Australian cricket that everyone needs to “move on” – but compare and contrast the recent comments of three gnarly old Australian greats and something else stands out too.

Adam Gilchrist said: “Guys have had their say. We’ve just got to deal with it and move on.”

Michael Clarke said: “I would just like to see whatever the truth is, for it all to come out, allow people to finally tell the truth, and move on.”

Mark Waugh said: “Unless there’s other evidence, I don’t know where you go with it, so I think you’ve just got to move on.”

So on the moving on point, they’re unanimous. It’s just the finer points of how that might be accomplished on which they don’t agree.

So move on we must. But should those implicated get to decide that they’ve already done so?

Abrasion evasion: Usman Khawaja’s sandpaper non-revelations have revealed so many fresh flavours of dishonesty

Usman Khawaja is here to finally reveal The Truth about Australia sandpapering a cricket ball that time! Unfortunately for Ussie, shining a brighter light is also going to pick out a great many previously overlooked untruths hanging from it…

Remember when Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft lied their way through an entire press conference because they thought that cheating using something that technically wasn’t sandpaper somehow wasn’t as bad as doing the exact same cheating using actual sandpaper?

Yeah, that’s the detail everyone’s got an issue with here, lads. You’re really getting to the heart of the matter with that explanation.

If that incident should have provided a lesson that being wriggly and evasive wasn’t the way forward, nobody heeded it. People have been either saying or conspicuously avoiding saying unhelpful stuff ever since.

The back story

Let’s do this properly.

In 2018, Australia’s Cameron Bancroft was caught sandpapering the ball in a Test match at Cape Town. A Cricket Australia investigation generated an extraordinary volume of self-important corporate waffle, after which Bancroft, captain Steve Smith and ringleader/orchestrator David Warner were given performative 12-month bans.

Against all odds, Warner was the least annoying during this period in the wilderness. (A period that also gave us the Disgraced Smith a sad sight drinking alone in New York headline, so don’t let anyone tell you nothing good came of it.)

All three were then back in the team in time for the 2019 Ashes. (Yes, even Bancroft. He played the first two Tests but was then dropped after somehow managing to play even worse than Warner.)

That was sort of that for a couple of years until Bancroft was interviewed by the Guardian’s Donald McRae. Asked if some of the bowlers – the very guys who would have specifically benefited from his craftsmanship – also knew about the sandpaper, Bancroft strongly suggested they did.

Apparently a great deal more surprised by this revelation than literally everyone else who has ever seen a game of cricket, Cricket Australia gasped in astonishment and “reached out” to Bancroft via its ludicrously overblown “integrity unit,” inviting/daring him to provide more details.

Cricket Australia asks Cameron Bancroft if he’s going to remove more things from beneath the carpet

The four Australia bowlers in that match – Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Nathan Lyon and Mitchell Starc – then released an outraged-sounding statement, the finer points of which we’ll return to in a moment.

“It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us.”

Usman Khawaja has now released his autobiography and expanded our understanding a little. The general thrust is…

They knew! And they let it happen! (Although, thankfully, not to kids.)

This headline revelation is sufficiently obvious that it doesn’t in fact even qualify as one. It’s no more than a confirmation really. In that narrower, more obvious sense, it doesn’t actually give much to talk about. It does however allow us to rescrutinise previous claims, counter-claims, denials and obfuscation under a harsher light.

Most obviously, there’s that highfalutin Cricket Australia investigation. You tell people you’ve got an “integrity unit” and that it’s carried out a thorough investigation and people envisage a crack team of single-minded detectives. They imagine Guy Pearce going from interview to interview room, manipulating everyone to extract the truth, while Russell Crowe champs at the bit, desperate to beat it out of them.

At the very least, you imagine that they’ll have bothered speaking to some of the other people in the team.

But no – not so much, apparently.

As David Warner put it this week: “Ussie was sitting next to Cameron Bancroft. Ussie was not interviewed. How is that a thorough investigation?”

Keeping that fact in mind, how do you read Cricket Australia’s response to Khawaja’s comments this week? “All relevant information presented to CA to date has been properly considered and we remain comfortable with the findings of our integrity process.”

The biggest word there is “presented,” isn’t it? ‘We’ve sat on our arses and had a glance at absolutely everything that was voluntarily brought to us on a silver platter.’

And the players?

We’ve been given a few little insights into team culture off the back of this. Writing at the time, Geoff Lemon said he didn’t think then captain Steve Smith could control Warner and instead just tried to accommodate him. Khawaja confirms this, saying that when players were discussing the use of sandpaper in the changing rooms, Smith, “essentially threw his hands in the air and said he didn’t want to know.”

The reason they were discussing it at all was because Australia felt South Africa had been messing with the ball themselves and so they were desperately trying to find a way to catch up.

It has to be said, this whole affair has been nothing but an endless string of victories for South Africa (thus far). If they were tampering with the ball to get reverse swing, they were doing it more effectively than Australia AND concealing their method more successfully to boot. They were doing it so well, in fact, that they basically goaded the opposition into rash, self-destructive acts that are still causing problems for them eight years later.

(It’s worth stating at this point that South Africa captain Faf du Plessis had actually been found guilty of ball tampering twice by this point: first in 2013 and then again in 2016, against Australia. The aftershocks of those were a little smaller, weren’t they? The second time, he played in the next Test and hit a hundred, and then a month after that he was named Test captain.)

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Neil Manthorp, who has long been the best source of information on the South Africa cricket team, says Australia first started getting the hump about this sort of thing on the 2014 tour. Warner apparently became convinced that the home team’s method had something to do with AB de Villiers’ wicketkeeping gloves.

It sounds like the South Africans were aware of these suspions. (One can imagine Warner perhaps mentioning it in passing on the field of play.) De Villiers therefore went out of his way to really ham it up whenever the ball came to him, which probably goes a long way towards explaining this moment:

Breaking down David Warner and Nathan Lyon’s run-out of AB de Villiers – one of the most disrespectful dismissals in history

Colourful times.

Another of Khawaja’s non-revelations is that this wasn’t the first time Australia tried to use sandpaper on the ball. He doesn’t mention the conspicuous strapping on Warner’s hand in the previous Test, but does say the team identified an opportunity when the umpires placed the match ball on the boundary edge before the start of each session as they walked to the middle.

“At that point, there’d be no cameras on us and the umpires would be about 100 metres ahead. We could then do whatever we wanted.”

At this point, we’ll return to the wording of that outraged denial of Cummins, Hazlewood, Lyon and Starc. “We did not know a foreign substance was taken onto the field to alter the condition of the ball until we saw the images on the big screen at Newlands.”

It’s tempting to read this as an acknowledgement that they knew a foreign substance was employed off the field, but that’s probably reading too much into things. After all, if you were putting that much thought into your evasion, wouldn’t you also leave out, “We pride ourselves on our honesty”?

Conclusion

The kind of cheating where you then also have to be incredibly skilful for it to actually have an impact is not, in our eyes, the world’s greatest crime. Not everyone tolerates the exact same shades of grey, however, and there are plenty out there who go further than that and actively pride themselves on the bitonal nature of their perception.

We wrote at the time that the written law is that cricketers can only polish the ball, whereas the unwritten law is pretty much: “Just don’t get caught, okay, because then we all have to feign outrage.”

That unwritten law needs extending a little though, because the other issue is that as well as having to feign outrage, many involved feel they need to speak sufficiently ambiguously that their words can’t later be reinterpreted as outright lies when fresh information comes to light.

It’s still going on now. As a recent example, it’s impossible to read head coach Darren Lehmann’s words from this week without immediately parsing them for subtext or omission.

“I don’t think everyone would have known,” he said. “You do know ball tampering is going on because it’s been happening for 150 years. It’s just how it’s being done, and how you would know to that extent? I can only speak to what I know, and I know ball tampering was a big part of the game of cricket. Now it is obsolete.”

If we were forced to point to a definitive summation of all of this, we’d go for a line from assistant coach David Saker in 2021. His words read at the time as unhelpfully abstract, but we now see them as a decent acknowledgement that he and everyone else who knew what was going on was responsible – not just the instigators, but also those who merely did a Smith, throwing their hands into the air and saying they didn’t want to know.

“There was a lot of people to blame,” said Saker. “It could have been me to blame, it could have been someone else. It could have been stopped and it wasn’t, which is unfortunate.”

That’s all well and good, but what’s incredible is that after eight years, it still hasn’t been stopped, has it? We don’t mean the sandpapering itself – we’ve no idea about that. We mean the denials and the omerta; that wider culture of looking the other way. If this week has told us anything, it is that in many places that same subterfuge is still being vigorously pursued.

Australia have been caught ball-tampering. But what was the worst aspect? And what was the funniest?

International cricket moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could find that four years have passed since you last referenced Ferris Bueller. Against that dizzying backdrop, it’s a doubly jarring experience to look at a scorecard and realise that India’s ODI top order still hasn’t moved on from January 2011 when Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli first occupied batting positions one and three.

South Africa’s openers in that match were Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla. Two days before, Andrew Strauss and Steven Davies had walked out first for England against Australia, before Shane Watson and Brad Haddin began (and in Watson’s case completed) the reply.

It was, in short, a long time ago.

Virat Kohli will be insanely easy to replace

About 18 months ago, we wrote retirement pieces about Rohit and Kohli. Neither had played Test cricket in months and both had already bowed out of international T20 cricket back in June 2024. Modern cricket may be a sporting world out of which players absent themselves only incrementally, but those exits felt more definitive and India visibly moved on.

A new age had dawned and we’re now a dozen Tests into it. A year and a half is an eternity these days. Jake Weatherald has both come and then gone in that time. India’s two former captains have therefore come to feel like creatures from the Mesozoic Era – Gypsonictops, say, or Angrivarodon.

Rohit Sharma: all over the place as a Test batter, less annoying than Virat Kohli as a Test captain

Even if you did suspect they weren’t yet extinct, the two men are such gargantuan historic figures you’d never think to look for them in bilateral ODIs – cricket’s least-fashionable, easiest-to-ignore arena.

You see “India v Sri Lanka at Guwahati, match 6 of 7” and you don’t click through to the scorecard, do you? Those aren’t proper matches. No-one in the world is desperate to find out whether Gurnoor Brar or Auqib Nabi got any wickets.

Yet there they are: Rohit and Virat, titans of days past, still turning out for India like they’re proper, present day international cricketers.

Virat got a few against New Zealand today. India won by five wickets (DLS Method).

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South Africa picked spin bowlers twice as often as Australia in this series and won twice as many Tests. You probably don’t want to run too far with that equation as a Test team, but it’s worth keeping in mind next time you think you can monopace your way to victory.

The third Test was actually the first time Australia matched South Africa’s tally of spinners (one), but Pat Cummins opted to bowl first. 

Pat’s judgement is of course beyond reproach – any book for which he is willing to write a foreword is guaranteed to be exceptional – but bowling first has not, historically, been considered the spin focused option. 

Bowling second and fourth, Simon Harmer took half of the Australian wickets that fell. Nathan Lyon did take advantage of the wearing pitch to top score for the visitors in that final innings, but this is not generally how spinners win matches for you. You’d think Australia would know this given Lyon had already top scored at this ground once before to no great effect.

David Warner said that the batters’ performance was “un-Australian”. Everybody sort of knows what he’s driving at, but also thinks it’s a vacuous non-comment which doesn’t really mean anything. 

Ahead of the final day, Warner had predicted an Australia victory with Marnus Labuschagne 100-odd not out at the end. Marnus in fact fell 96 runs short of three figures, which was one thick-edged full toss closer than he’d got in the first innings.

Word on the street is that Marnus is down to his last 30 chances. If he wants to make himself useful, maybe be should think about jacking in the medium-pace and reverting to spin.

We read this week that Brendon McCullum has been disaster planning for next winter’s World Cup. This does not mean planning the exact way in which it will be a disaster – something England coaches often seem to have done to deliver previous campaigns – but planning how to handle worst case scenarios, should they arise. The absolute worst case scenario, we imagine, would be Adil Rashid getting injured. 

Over at Cricinfo, Vish seems to think England’s recent results might call for some of these newly dreamed-up emergency remedies to be employed – but as far as we can make out that process is already underway. It looks to us like these horrors were in fact the product of some early field testing.

To recap: in the last week, England failed to defend 430 against Sri Lanka before losing to Pakistan when they’d had them 154-9 in pursuit of 242.

In both cases, Adil Rashid was not in the team. Obviously, we cannot know this for certain, but equally obviously we actually do: England would have won both games had he been playing.

It’s true.

Sure, Rashid can go for boundaries, but he has always been hard to cart continuously. His USP – his raison d’etre, even – is that set batters eventually mishit one. If they don’t, it is because they have consciously held back from doing so, in which case they’ll have shifted an even greater weight of necessary run-scoring to the overs delivered by the other bowlers.

Sri Lanka reached their target with one ball and two wickets to spare. Pakistan had a few balls left unused, but they were already down to their final wicket by the 34th over. England should have won both. With Rashid, they would have won both.

It has always been like this. Since the 2015 World Cup, England have won more one-day matches than they’ve lost. Before that, it was the reverse. Adil Rashid became a regular only after that tournament. This is not a coincidence.

Jos Buttler remains an asset, but his days of outright irreplaceability are in the past. For England, there is only one disaster that cannot be mitigated.

England’s two key match-ups for any T20 match: Jos Buttler v Anyone and Adil Rashid v Anyone

So that’s that. England have made their contingency plans for Rashid being unavailable and the outcome of those plans is that they will lose matches they’d otherwise have won. 

It’s not what you’d call a flawless plan, but you work with what you have. This is the disaster plan.

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Here we are again then. Another team carried by James Anderson has somehow concluded that it is too good for James Anderson and has asked him to leave. Who next? Is he going to get booted off the Burnley CC “Anyone free on Sunday?” WhatsApp thread when they aim for a fresh start in the next season’s over-40s league?

Given the awkwardness and shabbiness that characterised Anderson’s protracted Test exit, it’s almost possible to forget that England did actually give him a dedicated send-off Test. For a few days there, the more pompous parts of English cricket regally simmered him for another of their feasts, their appetite for ceremony seemingly bottomless. 

Theme Tests

To our mind, English cricket has a growing problem with this kind of thing. Every time a long-serving player announces their retirement – and they generally are announced in advance these days – the game’s veneration apparatus fires up so that a Special Test Match can be put on.

It is entirely natural to talk about a great player if you know it’s their final appearance. Things have gone too far now though. It’s not just a guard of honour for their final innings; it’s performative ovations, interviews with the family and endless rheumy-eyed montages. 

Anderson’s dedicated theme Test, against the West Indies in 2024, was about as bad as they come. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the tribute, it was the contrivance of it. Everyone knew he’d been dropped, but they’d allowed him this one last Test to say goodbye. That made it all about one man in a way Test matches involving 21 other cricketers shouldn’t be. The West Indies being cold and bad didn’t help with this at all.

And it had to be at Lord’s too, of course – the supposed ‘home’ of a sport that was bequeathed to Anderson by a family who’d most likely never been there; a sport he played, fell in love with and mastered elsewhere. 

We’d seen this kind of thing before, of course. Alastair Cook’s final Test was overblown, but at least it was the end of a series. Stuart Broad got himself plenty of attention, but the prospect of levelling an Ashes series ensured that match could never have been all about him. The artifice of Anderson only being available for the first Test of a three-Test series made his feel like more of an exhibition game.

And it continues. Every big retirement seems to bring with it a new way of dicking about with the live game that’s actually going on. Ben Stokes’ retirement was announced not merely mid-Test, but while he was in the middle of a bowling spell.

Three flavours of vacuum created by Ben Stokes’ retirement

What is this obsession with exalting endings? Why does it matter? In reality, the final Test is the least important one. Nothing else hinges on it. The shape of a player’s career is already established by then. 

There’s a line between saying “thanks for your work” and manufacturing an artificial occasion. The way they dress these things up, it’s as if they’re more important than all that’s gone before. 

International sport isn’t a black tie awards ceremony. It isn’t a vehicle for tearful, indulgent acceptance speeches. It’s a competition. The players are there to compete. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done in the past, because every match is of its moment. 

Not everyone is afflicted by this trend, of course. For a start, most players’ final Tests can be identified only with hindsight. Cheteshwar Pujara only saw fit to label his a full two years after he played it. 

But even those who do have clarity at the time can choose to do things differently, if they want to. Two games before Stokes began conspicuously kicking over tables and firing party poppers, Kane Williamson wandered out of the spotlight with a magnificently casual, “Oh, by the way, that was my final Test.”

When push comes to shove

If you’d like a clear example of the fundamental worthlessness of all this pageantry, consider how you feel about Lancashire declining to offer Anderson a new contract. Specifically, does it feel like a new thing or does it feel like something we’ve had before?

Because England had already been ushering Anderson out for a good long while before that final tribute Test and that’s the feeling that endures. 

“So sorry. We’d love you to stay longer, but there’s a few things we really need to crack on with this afternoon,” they’d said. “Here’s your coat. Let us get the door for you.”

When you’re a quick bowler – and everyone forgets now that Anderson started off meaningfully rapid – retirement starts to become an acceptable topic of conversation as soon as you tip over into your 30s. Even if you’re playing well, people can’t help but begin to look past you at least some of the time.

If you’re old enough to remember – but not so old that you can’t remember – you’ll recall a time when young upstarts like Steven Finn were spoken of as natural successors. Coaches and commentators would at times be explicit about this. Finn was being groomed to take over the mantle, yet he would ultimately play his final Test eight years before the man who’d been considered his predecessor.

A few years later, Andrew Strauss came crashing in to make a proper start on the clear-out, waltzing Anderson off into the preliminary disposal zone of the garage. ‘I’m not definitively chucking him away,’ was the message, ‘but whoever takes over this job will have to actively go in there and bring him back’.

The soft binning of Anderson and Broad

That is exactly what Rob Key and Brendon McCullum did. 

But then a year or two later, they forced him out. 

James Anderson, clearly, is not a man who goes gentle into that good night. He’d no doubt concede himself that he tends to need a push with these things. There’s been so much pushing already though that it all feels a little undignified and the memories of a ceremonial Lord’s Test can’t undo that.

Is this the way the news really had to break; that Lancashire weren’t going to offer him a new contract? No coaching job to temper that development? No retirement announcement that would negate the need to even mention contracts at all?

We assume that for whatever reason – both parties’ refusal to give an inch, perhaps – there was no other way. 

The fact this has happened again makes England’s greatest bowler look like some kind of recurrent, helpless victim. Lancashire fare even worse, coming across as titanically ungrateful and with an inflated sense of their own worth.  

What James Anderson bowling in a bobble hat tells us about ourselves

No matter how old he gets, rushing to move on from James Anderson never looks too smart. Between Steven Finn’s retirement and his own, he took 241 Test wickets at 22.95. That’s more wickets than Steve Harmison took in his entire career. More wickets than Jasprit Bumrah. More wickets than Garry Sobers.

There’s what you think should be happening to a player of his age – steep, inexorable decline – and then there are the facts. 

The facts are these: Lancashire are in Division 2. They finished second from bottom this year and Anderson was the best bowler in the division. He took 50 wickets at 17.68.

We assume Lancashire’s budget for its playing staff is not colossal and we’d guess Sir Anderson was being paid rather more than the average Division 2 seamer. Nevertheless, he played on for the club when he didn’t need to and stepped in when they suddenly needed a captain. If the county has retained any kind of reputation for its cricket over this last decade, it is almost entirely down to one man.

No-one emerges from this well. It is, perhaps, a more honest finish.

Fortunately, endings don’t matter.

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Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. We don’t need turn either. And we don’t need to get to 88mph. What we need is just enough in the surface that we can bowl a bit of wobble seam.

Assailed by court summons and conflict after the break-up of his band, Stone Roses vocalist Ian Brown (singer would be a mislabelling) said he seriously considered doing “gardening for old people” as his next step. In the end, he decided he probably should return to “the filthiest business in the world” though and started writing some solo songs.

The first he wrote was Lions. He says he got the idea from images of England losing to Germany on penalties in the semi-final of Euro 96. “I thought it was pathetic – grown men crying,” he explained.

About 70 per cent of the (not very good) song is one lyric, repeated, which Brown said he took from an old BBC2 programme he’d seen in which a Rastafarian had been questioned about his faith. As the credits rolled, this guy was apparently, “beating his staff,” and saying, “There are no lions in England. Why do they have lions in Trafalgar Square and on the England shirt? There’s never been any lions here.”

All of which is an unnecessary preamble to saying there are no Lyons in Australia again either.

Last winter, Australia and England performed what we termed at the time a rather depressing selectorial diminuendo. Both teams stripped away varieties of bowling over the course of the Ashes and all that remained by Sydney was accurate right-arm fast-medium.

Mutual dullness shall pass, but for now Australia and England deserve each other

Not much has changed in South Africa. Andrew McGlashan reports that Gqeberha has been the most spin-friendly non-Asian Test ground over the last decade. Tweakers have accounted for 82 of the 234 wickets to have fallen there in that time, yet Australia have again decided to go into a Test without the sixth-highest Test wicket-taker of all time.

It’s not just them either. South Africa are also a spinner down after their “Oh hello, what’s this?” decision to pick two of the blighters for the first Test.

There’s clear merit in both teams’ decisions, of course. Kagiso Rabada was again available for South Africa – and it’s not like they’re entirely doing without a spinner as Simon Harmer is still playing. Australia have gone with Scott Boland and he has thus far lowered his Test bowling average from an already comical 18.58 at the start of the match.

But even if it does pan out, performance-wise (and there are currently some signs of South African lower order resistance) that still isn’t a satisfactory answer for other important questions.

Questions like: is this trend boring?

Matt Renshaw has been very difficult to ignore this week, whereas Jack Leach apparently remains incredibly easy to overlook.

We went to a Test match in Kandy once (Sri Lanka v West Indies if you’re wondering) and a Sky cameraman came into the stand and filmed us from about a metre away for what felt like 50,000 years.

At no point did he utter a single word to us. He didn’t, for example, ask, “Would it be weird if I filmed you watching cricket for what will feel like 50,000 years?”

To this we would have answered, “Well, it would be considerably less weird than filming us anyway from a distance of one metre WITHOUT EVER ONCE SPEAKING TO US.”

As for why he filmed us, it’s fair to say we did stick out a bit at Asgiriya that day. Casting an eye around the stands, it was clear our visual appearance was very, very different. This was because we do not look like an empty plastic seat.

Say what you like about attendances, but the empty plastic seats still turn out for most matches and they were treated to far more entertainment than they would have expected in Durban this week. This was because the first Test between South Africa and Australia made the unusual, old-fashioned move of carrying on until day five.

Bad light was perhaps a bigger contributor to that outcome than the two teams’ batters though, because only two players managed to pass 50 in the entire match.

The second half-centurion was Aiden Markram, who batted six pointless hours for 75, trying and failing to save a Test that was lost when Temba Bavuma had neglected to make any effort to prevent Matt Renshaw taking singles for the best part of a day, earlier in the match.

Renshaw finished that first innings with 190. He then made 82 in the second innings.

We have long felt that Renshaw was easily worth a place in Australia’s misfiring batting order, but we haven’t liked to mention it in case someone noticed and actually picked him. We are not here to encourage Australia to pick the correct players.

That particular machiavellian ploy has been rather ruined by this performance. The genie can’t be put back in the bottle. (This is a terrible idiom, by the way. One of the Arabian Nights stories is literally about a fisherman tricking a genie into going back into a bottle. It’s not even that hard. He basically just goads him into it.)

On the plus side, this does mean we can again write freely about Matt Renshaw without having to subcontract all referencing to people who are attempting to pass him off as little-known. If you’re wondering why this is such a positive development, it is because we get to point you all to a series of articles we have written about the time Renshaw had to retire hurt because of the wild shits. (Steve Smith does not emerge well from those tales.)

Speaking of involuntary expulsions, it sounds like Jack Leach is very much out. Asked about the spinner’s prospects on Wisden Cricket Weekly, national selector Marcus North said England were, “focusing on a slightly different direction,” for the foreseeable future.

Bit sad. We’ve always had a lot of time for Leach – although being as he’s not Australian, at least we’ve been able to say as much.

Raise your glasses: Jack Leach’s three silliest innings

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It was one of cricket’s biggest ever headlines – one we’ll never forget – and it was the product of a story that was first born on Australia’s last Test tour of South Africa. Much has been said and done in the years since, but it’s worth remembering that if it weren’t for that whole sandpaper thing we’d never have been treated to “Disgraced Smith a sad sight drinking alone in New York”.

What a time! What a media frenzy! What a headline!

We loved it so much that we felt moved to pick it apart and learn its complex workings so that we could then create The Steve Smith Headline Generator.

Back once again, with the ill behaviour 

Like a nettled child reluctant to grasp a nettle, Australia’s Test team has been reluctant to return to South Africa until now. This could be a good series. It could be a poor one. Either way, it should prove colourful. 

If nothing else, these are England’s two biggest Test opponents in the next 12 months, so it’s interesting to see how they’ll go about things. Reacquainting ourself with South Africa, in particular, they are not really shaping up how we were expecting. 

Actually, the batting is – at least on whatever the digital equivalent of paper is. The names may change, but South Africa has always done a line in stolid, meat and potatoes batters with weighty first-class records. 

The bowling though? When you think of South Africa v Australia Test cricket, it immediately conjures images of two groups of fast bowlers trying to out fast bowler each other in the firm belief that success will win them the title Most Fast Bowlerest Country In The World. 

And for the first Test? You go extra hard, don’t you? South Africa have brought back Anrich Nortje for seemingly just that purpose. He’s even brought facial hair that wouldn’t look out of place in the Gem Saloon (serious language and violence if you follow that link) so that he really looks the part.

But South Africa have also picked two spinners.

Two of them! Two!

That number again: Two!

This is not the way. The resultant fast bowling shortfall has resulted in Wiaan Mulder – an accurate medium-pace all-rounder best known for declaring on himself when he was near Brian Lara’s record Test score – opening the bowling. He did it well. We don’t know what to make of that either.

Long Boi

Australia are more familiar and we’re reassured to see they’re still engaging in shenanigans with their opening batters.

Today’s instalment in this seemingly endless saga involved bringing Nic Maddinson back for his first Test since 2016.

Maddinson hasn’t actually played any first-class cricket since March 2025. He lasted almost an hour, which wouldn’t have been too disastrous had he scored even a single run in that time.

Meanwhile, holding things together further down the order like a bit of tape (perhaps one garnished with “some granules from rough patches on the wicket“) was Matt Renshaw, who Australia quite sensibly seem to have started picking again.

Sundries

In the spirit of getting to know these teams ahead of their clashes with England, Ged Ladd has submitted what he bills as a “pre first look” at five less-well-known Aussie cricketers to watch out for in the coming months. Renshaw (somewhat inexplicably, given this is the 40th time he’s played for Australia) features among them.

Ged told us that the list of players was compiled by “Boe Blong Pete” ahead of “another Ashes visit to England by Aussie Pete and his family“. Ged duly investigated each of them, but rather than delivering the kind of deep dive that none of us would have time for, he has instead taken a far, far shallower one. This involved carrying out the kind of very light googling¹ that we also do not have time for.

In the spirit of the contribution, we have not checked one single detail² of what is published below.

1. Or if not googling then yahooing, duckduckgoing, or ecosiary – we don’t know what Ged uses. Perhaps it should have been binging in this instance, in honour of little-known Aussie speedster, Brett “Binga” Lee. ︎
2. Actually, we couldn’t help but notice he’d spelt Cooper Connolly’s second name two different ways. We deduced at least one of them must be wrong, so we corrected that. Nothing else though. ︎

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Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)

Tim writes…

Much has been written about the difficulties that scheduling cricket in September imposes on the players, and on the integrity of the various competitions that have their finale in the month. But about the suffering of the September spectators there has been barely a word. Until now.

When neighbour Steve and I set off to cycle the couple of miles to Headingley to watch Yorkshire versus Essex, the day promised to be one of patchy sunshine with only the possibility of rain in the final session to dampen our spirits.

Nevertheless, I put a thermal T-shirt on underneath my normal attire, and put my winter hill walking jacket in my pannier just in case.

As we settled into seats in the upper tier of the North East Stand, I was glad I had. Our elevated position at long off/fine leg offered a great view of the action, but put us right in the path of a stiff chill wind. Mind you, it did help display the flags of the rival teams to great advantage.

Earlier we had passed the pleasingly low key security bag check, and locked up our bikes on what must be the best bike parking in Headingley. For £18, you can leave your bike under cover all day with security guards patrolling, and you get a free cricket match to watch if you fancy it.

The ground was far from full, of course, but still I estimated a good 600+ folk had braved the leaden skies on a Thursday. Naturally, many were clearly retired. I wasn’t sure whether as a 50-something I felt young in this company, or disconcertingly at home.

What I definitely felt was envious of the many who had brought a hat; even more envious of the couple with a blanket.

Talk soon turned to food, and Steve proved his foresight by producing a box of homemade cake. He also had a flask of hot coffee – anything stronger being off the menu given the temperature (although glühwein would’ve been good).

A little while later, we decided we didn’t need to wait for the official lunch time to have ours and tucked into our sandwiches in the hope they might provide fuel to warm us up – mine a cheddar and homemade refried beans in white bread combination.

A pleasant chap in the row in front told us that, in his opinion, Grace Road has the best food on the county circuit, but that Headingley was still okay. However, not being members we were unable to enter the pavilion to verify this, and with the Pimm’s kiosk closed for some reason (did I mention it was freezing?), we opted instead to leave the ground during lunchtime.

40 minutes was plenty of time to go record shopping at the excellent Vinyl Whistle, and buy some veggie samosas from the corner shop opposite the Kirkstall Lane gates. These provided some tasty spice heat, but no actual warmth. 

Before play resumed, there was just time to visit the gents, charmingly unmodernised, where many patrons expressed their relief at being able to warm up their hands in the hot water in the sinks. 

Hoped for sunshine in the afternoon mostly failed to materialise, apart from for a few, brief, blissful moments. At one point, a large red kite floated across the ground, but there was not much left of the Essex batting line up for it to pick over – and thankfully we in the stands looked lively enough to keep it at bay. Perhaps it was all the violent shivering. 

We talked about working on farms around the world, the eating habits of teenagers, and various membership ticket prices with another friendly fellow fan – also a striking result in a local junior 20-over match, where one team had scored 270 and then bowled the opposition out for 6; a contest even more one-sided than the one in front of us.

Then we were able to go home early before the rain arrived, thanks to the effort and skill of George Hill and particularly Kuldeep Yadav. 

All in all a very enjoyable day out, and we’ll be back – but probably not before it turns warm in May.